The Gravity-Shielding Rig Is In A Crate In Huntsville. Inventory Number 4471.

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama — The crate is 2.1 metres long and it sits in bay 12.

Inventory number 4471. A federal contractor's warehouse outside Huntsville holds it under a standing property-disposal record, which this newspaper obtained by telephoning and asking for it, and which lists the contents in one line of fixed-width type: one 300-millimetre disc, one rotating cryostat, two lock-in amplifiers, one differential balance, one test log.

That is the apparatus built to settle the 1996 rotating-superconductor claim — the claim that a spinning superconducting disc reduces the weight of whatever sits above it.

It was built. It was funded to $607,000. It was cooled and run sixty-one times. It returned a null in March 2002, the final report is public, and the repository's own counter says that report has been downloaded thirty-one times. Two of those are us.

What page three says

The disc was never spun at 5,000 revolutions per minute.

Five thousand is the figure the original claim requires. The rig's magnetic bearing failed at 3,100 on 8 November 2001 and was not replaced, because the vendor's quote arrived with eleven weeks left on the grant and what remained on the line would not cover the part, the fitting and the recommissioning together.

None of that is a revelation. It is on page three of the published final report, under a heading that reads Limitations, and it has been there since March 2002.

The bearing

The quote in the file is $900 for the bearing assembly, six weeks' delivery.

We are putting that number high in this story and we should be plain about what it is. It is the part. It is not the fitting, the realignment, the recertification of a helium loop that has been dry for twenty-four years, or the two years of a professional life that Dr. Roselle Achterberg-Owusu says the work would actually take. She ran the programme, she disputes our framing, and her reply is printed below at length because she is largely right.

What the $900 is, is the reason the running stopped. Not a judgement about physics. A part, a quote, and a date on a calendar.

Twenty-four years of nobody asking

The disposal record carries a field for transfer requests. Any accredited institution may enter one. The field is blank, and has been blank since 2002.

The test log — 214 pages, handwritten in the margins by three people — is inside the crate. Nobody has asked to read it.

So we asked. We wrote to the disposal officer named on the record at 09:14 on a Tuesday and enquired whether this newspaper might borrow the apparatus.

The answer came at 09:25. Eleven minutes. It said yes, subject to a standard loan agreement and proof of a cryogenics-rated facility, which we do not have and are now looking for a partner to provide.

What this desk takes from it

The rig exists. It is in a numbered box, in a numbered bay, in a building anybody may telephone during business hours.

The report saying the experiment found nothing has been public since 2002 and has been opened thirty-one times.

And the reason a famous claim about gravity has sat unsettled for thirty years is not that anybody hid the apparatus. It is that a bearing failed at 3,100 revolutions with eleven weeks left on the grant, what was left on the line covered the part but not the fitting and the recommissioning, and nobody since has wanted to spend two years of a career establishing that something does not happen.

We asked to borrow it and were told yes in eleven minutes. If your institution has a cryogenics-rated bay and would like to finish this, the desk would like to hear from you.